BLESSED DELIVERANCE
Who knew that old-ass Headass was capable of even greater feats of headassery? Our little crew had become accustomed long ago to his foolishness, the imbecilic way he walked around Bed-Stuy with his lips swelled up, duh-duh, all the various look-at-me antics. We were bored with him, he was dull, the five of us paid him no mind. He might as well have been a fire hydrant. It had ceased to affect us when he interrupted our hangs in the park by barking out one of his nonsensical jokes, every punch line a non sequitur, or by unzipping his dusty jeans and pulling forth from the opening, inch by inch, the ashiness of his dick. By the time we started high school, his pratfalls on the basketball court while a couple of us tried to hoop were no longer amusing—we just dribbled around him and told him to go bother people his own age—and when he would dig in the trash for scraps of pizza or the half-eaten remains of fried-hard chicken wings, clowning wasn’t worth it anymore, it was no longer worth the breath for one of us to say to another, hey bitch, hey motherfucker, hey, peep it, there he goes again, you see him right, look, there he is, there goes your father.
Truth be told, we didn’t even know Headass was still around. Word was he’d been framed for armed robbery or some such and was doing a bid. Others said he’d been tracked down by a very distant relative and was living in Louisiana among his people, if it’s possible for near strangers to be your people. The most dubious and therefore most prevalent rumor contained some version of him plummeting tragically into the East River from the hive of coffin-size, bike chain–bound plywood shanties that sheltered the homeless just below the upper deck of the Manhattan Bridge. What had actually happened, we eventually found out, was a police raid of an abandoned building on Lefferts, a former hotel where Headass, among others, had been squatting. Nothing had changed about the status of the building—it hadn’t been sold to some developer, at least not yet—but for whatever reason (we knew the reason) certain cruelties of the law were now being strictly enforced.
By the time senior year rolled around, however, it didn’t really matter what had happened. The five of us weren’t thinking about Headass at all. Other things were on our minds. College, for instance, was becoming an exciting prospect, even though we were each interested in different ones, and regardless of the fact that the guidance counselor had cast a puckered frown at our lists of schools, striking out the Harvards and Yales, and the Howards and Spelmans too, meanwhile telling us through his teeth that despite our grades and vocabularies and test scores we shouldn’t get our hopes too high. Our parents all seemed to be going through it too, some losing their jobs, some suffering the very first symptoms of what would be fateful illnesses, some separating divorcing reuniting testing new loves, and though we hardly talked much to one another about these things in any explicit way, there was an awareness among us of a common feeling, disgust but also bafflement that we had so little sense of who our mothers and fathers really were, and that despite our trepidation about growing dull with age, life apparently would never stop with the excitement, leaping from the gray shadows of alleyways to jump you, knocking you to the ground and seriously kicking your ass. We weren’t old yet, however. Far from it. Which meant that our bodies, unbeleaguered, and intact as far as we knew, weren’t dull at all, they were fascinating. Which meant that we could do whatever, or whoever, we wanted with them, and who and what we wanted to do could change from week to week or day to day or moment to precious moment, in such a sudden and all-consuming way that each new desire was, in essence, the first ever desire, with every one prior to it cast instantly into a pitch-darkness as formless and empty as the original canvas of the earth. Much of what we (a few of us, at least) wanted to do was sex. For the most part we (a few of us) hooked up, or approached doing so, with those outside of our crew, but since the summer we (again, a few of us) had also developed new and irresistible interests in one another. The fact that we were friends, that we had grown up together since we were little boys and girls, didn’t make these particular desires strange, it made them strong. Even though some awkwardness ensued, some friction, there had always been trust among us, you see, and with trust comes the gift of an ample room, or better yet, an open field, like the ones in the Botanic Garden or in Prospect Park where on warm days, when things seemed simpler, we used to lavish time, each field providing a volume of space in which to flex and stretch ourselves freely, to play, to recognize that our bodies absolutely belonged there, among all the other fragrant and colorful organisms surrounding us.
One afternoon, during a balmy October weekend, the five of us assembled for the first time since school had started up again and took a walk, something we used to do frequently. Call it an act of nostalgia. We stopped outside of the new store just across from the street of brownstones that always placed decently well in the annual Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest, and stood as one, peering in through the clouded windows. A sign said the store was open, but it truly looked nowhere near ready to welcome customers yet. Inside, among towers of large, haphazardly stacked boxes, were intricate arrangements of junk, each of which was surrounded by four low unattached grids of metal wire leaning precariously against one another. A strong sneeze could have sent them all clattering to the floor. Each arrangement contained variations of the same stuff: plastic bins, downy cushions, blankets, bowls, and pellets of dirt. A trio of white people—two women and a man, all wearing tan aprons—moved around slowly within the delicate maze of cardboard and metal, carrying large bags of what appeared to be desiccated grass. As they began to toss the twirling grasses here and there, everything around their feet twitched into motion, the entire floor leaped to life. The cushions weren’t cushions at all, we saw, but living things, animals—rabbits—grouped inside of rickety makeshift cages.
We stared as we realized how many there were. About twenty cages, each housing two or three rabbits, so maybe fifty in total. Most of them were hopping around or furiously nibbling, but some settled quickly back into absolute stillness. There was something striking about these in particular, the assurance of their repose, the serene confidence that everything they wanted would eventually and inevitably arrive.
In response to all of this, we slipped easily into our trademark goofiness and banter. Riffing on our old script felt like a form of solace. When Walidah, incredulous, expressed her opinion that the animals were too large to be rabbits, that the somber droop of their ears meant they were something else entirely, Roni told her to shut up. “We all know your ideas about the world still come from cartoons,” she teased.
“They are plump, whatever they are,” Antonio said, putting his arm around Cherise. He eyed her with the overwrought expression of hunger he had developed during the summer. “You should find out what they eat,” he added. “We can put you on their diet.”
Cherise, who had always been self-conscious about how narrow she was, watched with a slight frown as the animals ate. She seemed uncertain whether Antonio’s words amounted to criticism or encouragement. “Guess they do look happy,” she said finally, and then slipped the pleasing fat of her bottom lip into her mouth to suppress a smile.
“They are indeed rabbits,” a man’s voice announced, “but actually there are guinea pigs and chinchillas too.” The voice sounded peculiar, like something massive pressed densely small, both loud and restrained at the same time. The white man with the apron was peeking his head out of the open door. “Come on in, kids,” he said. “Let’s introduce you to them.”
Shrugs. When we followed him inside, the two women were cheesing maniacally at us, and for reasons we couldn’t discern they kept nodding their heads. As we separated and looked around, the man explained that the place was actually a rescue, and then he began rattling off the names of the animals (“That’s Oreo, that’s Marshmallow, Sasha’s over there, and that’s Balthazar…”), but he spoke too quickly for us to keep up. He had a pronounced underbite and a highly suspect chin beard that might as well have been a glued-on strap of mangled pelt. His face and skull were captivating, to be honest, but it was in our best interest—in the best interest of us—to focus on what made his features hilarious, to imagine his onrush of words as, say, a waterfall flowing over the jagged precipice of his bottom teeth. After naming all the animals for us, he mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that his own name was Cyan. He neglected to introduce the women.
“They eat grass? Dogs shit on grass.”
“Technically it’s hay,” Cyan said, pointing a finger upward. “But they can’t subsist on hay alone. It doesn’t provide all the nutrients.” He then offered us an opportunity to feed the animals some lettuce.
“So you can really get thick like that by eating lettuce and hay?” Antonio asked.
Cyan gave a heh-heh laugh, false and uncomprehending but good-natured, and then called toward the back of the store for someone named Reginald. In a moment, this Reginald walked in, except Reginald wasn’t Reginald. Reginald was Headass. He stood there, looking even taller and lankier than usual, though a bit more youthful, with a semblance of a healthful glow. He was also wearing an apron, and against his chest he held a clear plastic bin filled with wet, brilliantly green leaves. His pants and kicks were clean—well, clean for Headass, anyway, meaning they weren’t filthy—and his matted hair was parted oddly on one side. The part itself, which revealed his pale skin in a broad strip, glistened with some kind of grease. We gaped at the sight of him, he yawned at the sight of us. Then, in a snap, a crooked grin stretched the left side of his face, like the banner of some new country tautened by a sudden wind.
“Y’all hired Headass?”
Cyan pursed his lips and then gave his heh-heh laugh again. “It was always our intention to engage people from the community,” he said in his funny voice, with enough brightness to blind us. “Reginald here was the perfect person to help us out.”
The sound of that name had the effect of a magic word, activating Headass again. He stepped forward, but instead of distributing the food among the animals in any way that would have made sense, he set the bin down on the floor, grabbed a handful of the greens, and stepped over the tremulous perimeter of a cage, entering it with two easy strides. He lowered himself until he was sitting cross-legged with the cage’s three rabbits, who, after a moment of wariness and agitation, reacted surprisingly well to him. Headass slowly lifted one of the rabbits, a portly auburn-colored one with flecks of black, and set it onto his lap. With evident pleasure, he began feeding it the edge of a leaf of lettuce.
“It appears that Reginald and dear Chicory have made a love connection,” one of the women said.
Headass was imitating the rabbit now, with rapid, pulsing movements of his nostrils and mouth, as though he were eating too. His fingers slowly stroked the air just above the fur, never touching it. The gesture made you feel the animal’s heat. When one of us started laughing, a moment passed before we could all figure out why, but when we did, the laughter became reassuringly infectious. The pellets scattered there in the cage with Headass—scattered in all the cages—weren’t made of dirt. He was sitting gleefully in a pile of the rabbits’ droppings.
* * *
We left the rescue and walked shoulder to shoulder to shoulder and so on, incandescent with jokes and laughter, five lit bulbs on a string. It may be ridiculous, but seeing Headass, genuinely taking notice of him, really witnessing him rooted there in that playpen of dung, seemed to bind us in a way we hadn’t been bound in months, at least since the end of junior year. We walked and without speaking we agreed on which direction to turn on which corner, we came to an immediate consensus about where (the pizza parlor) and what (a pepperoni pie) to eat for lunch, and as we ate we expressed one enthusiastic opinion about the new album everyone was talking about, which had been released without warning at midnight. We quickly agreed on which song was the best, possessed of the most fire, and after lunch when we played it aloud on one of our phones, we stopped walking and claimed a little pocket of Marcus Garvey Boulevard, making it gorgeous as hell with our singing and our shouts and the perfectly synchronized dance steps we devised right there on the spot. Even the two of us boys who had grown increasingly shy about that kind of display, especially in the last few months, were completely into it for a minute, gleefully popping our butts along with the girls until it became suddenly too awkward, and when our little performance was done we all leaned into one another and cackled in a spirit of gratified exhaustion, without a trace of cynicism, irony, or embarrassment.
As we resumed our walk, one word seemed to come to all of our minds at the same time: Reginald. Why were those white people referring to Headass as Reginald? we screamed, which sent us into more fits of laughter. And then—again, all at the same time, it seemed—we invoked Toby for Kunta Kinte, SoHa for lower Harlem, DoBro for downtown Brooklyn, all the examples we could think of that illustrated the ways they claimed the right to name and rename whoever and whatever they pleased. We agreed without debate, without an utterance of doubt, that Reginald could not under any circumstance be his government name, but we did not speak of the fact that we too had named him—we had done it ourselves, or our uncles and older cousins who had grown up with him and gone to school with him and were also, sometimes, a part of us, had done it—and so it was easy to avoid that particular complication since he had always, as far as we knew, answered to Headass, and, after all, it was a different thing entirely to speak of what we, whoever we comprised at a given moment, decided to call ourselves. We avoided the complications of that too, the idea that Headass was also, sometimes, in a peculiar way, a part of us, because in that moment all that really mattered was the beautiful hazy dream of we-the-five restored to harmony.
But then, when it was suggested that we go over to Antonio’s apartment, which is exactly what we would have done before, back when things were normal, he hesitated. In the span of a silence like that you could hear the sound of the breeze plucking, stalk from stem, a yellowing leaf away from its branch. Antonio looked down at his hands as they gripped the sides of his jeans. He told us we shouldn’t come over today. It was messy. Things were still weird at home. He said lately his mother had been feeling even worse, and he started to say something more, anxious to offer additional excuses, as if he needed them, but instead let it trail away. “Yeah,” he added uselessly after another heavy pause, rubbing the splendid bulb of his nose. Cherise cleared her throat and said she had to go too. Then the two of them said hasty goodbyes and walked off as if holding hands, going in a direction where neither of them lived.
“So,” Roni said to Walidah, “what was it you were gonna show me? One of your cartoons…?”
Walidah nodded, her eyes shrouded beneath their lids. “Yeah, that’s right…” Then the girls, who had developed a new and hard-won intimacy, left together too, a careful distance maintained between them, together but apart, and just like that, with inexplicable ease, our reunion, our alliance, was again, however lovely the bond, broken.
* * *
Two weeks later, though, our dormant group text lit up with a message from Cherise, telling us all to come by the animal rescue again to see what was happening. She was already there, a second message said. So was Antonio.
Walidah and Roni were the last to arrive, but they made it in time to see some of the spectacle. Headass was stalking back and forth outside of the rescue, wearing a bulky costume. The intention was probably to attract people who were, or could be, lovers of the Leporidae, but he was playing it all wrong. From where we stood along the curb, the fur was convincing enough, smooth as though someone had carefully combed down all the fibers, and aside from a smudge here and there it gleamed a solid silvery-white. But below at the feet and up by his hands, which were raised, fingers rigid and spread as in the posture of a demon giving chase, the color graded into the hideous fleshy pink of skinned game. As Headass moved his feet and hands mechanically up and down, he seemed to carve the air with the costume’s pointed yellow nails. For some reason, he was also wearing a stiff plaid vest, which jumped on his body like an ill-fitting shell. But the strangest thing, the thing we couldn’t stop whispering to one another about, was the way Headass’s face peeked out of the creature’s open mouth, as though he was being swallowed or bizarrely birthed. The costume gave him a frightening crown of sharp buckteeth that were the same awful yellow as the nails. Up top, the eyes were garish rings shaded pale blue and salmon. If it wasn’t for the ears, which were as languid as those of the real rabbits inside, it would have been reasonable to think Headass was pretending to be a rat with albinism.
Behind him, Cyan stood in the doorway of the rescue, leaning within the threshold and chewing loose fistfuls of peanuts. He must have heard us asking one another about the sound Headass was making. “Little-known fact,” he called, “but rabbits have the ability to purr, just like our feline friends. It’s much cooler though. You know why? Rabbits do it with their teeth.”
Headass wasn’t doing anything with his teeth, and the noise he was making didn’t sound one bit like purring. It was more like a drawn-out, melancholic moan. He was hardly stopping long enough to breathe.
Cyan wiped his hands on the front of his pants and came over to us. Specks of papery brown skin from the peanuts had become stuck in his beard. “This was Reginald’s idea, you know. So we let him choose whichever costume he wanted. It’s maybe not what we would have gone with but there’s definitely something to it.”
Maybe Cyan wasn’t all bad, for an invader.
“It was cool of y’all to hire a homeless dude.”
Cyan seemed taken aback by the comment. He said, “Well, technically … he’s a volunteer.”
“Wait, you don’t pay him?”
He listened to Headass moan and nodded regretfully. “If only we could.”
“Do you feed him?”
Cyan balked. “Feed him? Well, there’s always lots of leftover romaine, not to mention—let’s see—bok choy, watercress, kohlrabi…”
Maybe not.
We watched Headass stop, spin on his heels, and start again in the opposite direction.
“There haven’t been as many adoptions as we might have liked,” Cyan said to us, changing the subject. The two white women who worked there were the only people inside. “Not a single one so far, in fact. But folks seem curious, that’s for sure. They slow down when they pass by. They peek in. Building interest is always step numero uno.”
“You can’t really expect there to be a lot of rabbit adoptions in the hood,” Roni said, with a razor in her voice.
“Why not?” he replied. “History tells us that rabbits appeal to people from all walks of life. Certain rodents too, studies have shown. Besides, this isn’t really the hood anymore, is it?”
Cyan was right about that last part, though he spoke as if he had absolutely nothing to do with it. His comment made us stare first at him and then around at the drivers parading by in their eco-friendly cars and the cyclists who actually wore helmets and biking shorts, pumping their nickel-bright knees, assaulting us with their show of law-abiding goodness and safety. But all of that was oppressively dull—we knew it too well—so we didn’t comment on it. What was interesting to us were the people and places that were gone. When Cyan went back inside, and as Headass continued his marching and moaning, we found ourselves scrutinizing the rescue itself. What exactly had been there before? Any one of us could have gone in and asked Cyan or the rescue ladies about it, but none of us wanted to. There was nothing appealing about the possibility of acquiring the information from them, from some records they had dug up as part of a business plan. It would have been that merely. Information, data. Looking it up with a phone would have felt similarly cheap. The thing was to remember, to use our minds and their keen branching tails, to recollect via the spark of the scintillating connections we could make on our own. But once the topic was broached and we discussed it among ourselves, no one could conjure up the answer. For a long time, before the opening of the rescue, the space had been empty, with a sign in the clouded window that read COMMERCIAL SPACE FOR RENT.
All of a sudden Headass pivoted and walked briskly toward us, as if all his back and forth had just been a way of winding himself up. He stood directly in front of us and peered down into our faces, fully inhabiting his bestial role. The teeth of his costume pressed pinholes into his worried brow.
“What’s up, Headass.”
Copyright © 2023 by Jamel Brinkley
